A survey of evaluation platforms for ad hoc routing protocols: a resilience perspective

Routing protocols allow for the spontaneous formation of wireless multi-hop networks without dedicated infrastructure, also known as ad hoc networks. Despite significant technological advances, difficulties associated with the evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols under realistic conditions, still hamper their maturation and significant roll out in real world deployments. In particular, the resilience evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols is essential to determine their ability of keeping the routing service working despite the presence of changes, such as accidental faults or malicious ones (attacks). However, the resilience dimension is not always addressed by the evaluation platforms that are in charge of assessing these routing protocols. In this paper, we provide a survey covering current state-of-the-art evaluation platforms in the domain of ad hoc routing protocols paying special attention to the resilience dimension. The goal is threefold. First, we identify the most representative evaluation platforms and the routing protocols they have evaluated. Then, we analyse the experimental methodologies followed by such evaluation platforms. Finally, we create a taxonomy to characterise experimental properties of such evaluation platforms.This work is partially supported by the Spanish Project ARENES (TIN2012-38308-C02-01), the ANR French Project AMORES (ANR-11-INSE-010), and the Intel Doctoral Student Honour Programme 2012.Friginal López, J.; Andrés Martínez, DD.; Ruiz García, JC.; Martínez Raga, M. (2014). A survey of evaluation platforms for ad hoc routing protocols: a resilience perspective. Computer Networks. 75(A):395-413. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2014.09.010S39541375

W-NINE: a two-stage emulation platform for mobile and wireless systems

More and more applications and protocols are now running on wireless networks. Testing the implementation of such applications and protocols is a real challenge as the position of the mobile terminals and environmental effects strongly affect the overall performance. Network emulation is often perceived as a good trade-off between experiments on operational wireless networks and discrete-event simulations on Opnet or ns-2. However, ensuring repeatability and realism in network emulation while taking into account mobility in a wireless environment is very difficult. This paper proposes a network emulation platform, called W-NINE, based on off-line computations preceding online pattern-based traffic shaping. The underlying concepts of repeatability, dynamicity, accuracy and realism are defined in the emulation context. Two different simple case studies illustrate the validity of our approach with respect to these concepts

Experimentation made easy with the AMazING panel

Experimental testbeds for evaluating solutions in computer networks, are today required as a complement to simulation and emulation. As these testbeds become larger, and accessible to a broader universe of the research community, dedicated management tools become mandatory. These tools ease the complex management of the testbed specific resources, while providing an environment for researchers to define their experiments with large flexibility. While there are currently several management tools, the research community is still lacking tools that smooth the experimentation workflow. These were key aspects that we considered when developing the management infrastructure for our wireless testbed[4] (AMazING). We developed a experimentation support framework supported by an attractive GUI, automation and scripting capabilities, as well as experiment versioning and integrated result gathering and analysis

Unified radio and network control across heterogeneous hardware platforms

Experimentation is an important step in the investigation of techniques for handling spectrum scarcity or the development of new waveforms in future wireless networks. However, it is impractical and not cost effective to construct custom platforms for each future network scenario to be investigated. This problem is addressed by defining Unified Programming Interfaces that allow common access to several platforms for experimentation-based prototyping, research, and development purposes. The design of these interfaces is driven by a diverse set of scenarios that capture the functionality relevant to future network implementations while trying to keep them as generic as possible. Herein, the definition of this set of scenarios is presented as well as the architecture for supporting experimentation-based wireless research over multiple hardware platforms. The proposed architecture for experimentation incorporates both local and global unified interfaces to control any aspect of a wireless system while being completely agnostic to the actual technology incorporated. Control is feasible from the low-level features of individual radios to the entire network stack, including hierarchical control combinations. A testbed to enable the use of the above architecture is utilized that uses a backbone network in order to be able to extract measurements and observe the overall behaviour of the system under test without imposing further communication overhead to the actual experiment. Based on the aforementioned architecture, a system is proposed that is able to support the advancement of intelligent techniques for future networks through experimentation while decoupling promising algorithms and techniques from the capabilities of a specific hardware platform

Architectures for the Future Networks and the Next Generation Internet: A Survey

Networking research funding agencies in the USA, Europe, Japan, and other countries are encouraging research on revolutionary networking architectures that may or may not be bound by the restrictions of the current TCP/IP based Internet. We present a comprehensive survey of such research projects and activities. The topics covered include various testbeds for experimentations for new architectures, new security mechanisms, content delivery mechanisms, management and control frameworks, service architectures, and routing mechanisms. Delay/Disruption tolerant networks, which allow communications even when complete end-to-end path is not available, are also discussed